by Sahasram
He thought he was playing a game. A new simulation appears on his computer without warning. The game looks impossibly realistic, but its first missions seem ridiculous—until he begins hearing screams. At first, he ignores them. Then strange things start happening around his own home. As the line between the game and reality begins to disappear, he has to figure out one terrifying question: Is he controlling the game—or is the game controlling him?created by Sahasram.
No streak history
One state-enhanced oracle order, filtered by each list. Observed Royal Road ranks remain separate ground truth.
Rank updated 2 Oct 2026, 17:08 UTC
Entry forecast updated 2 Oct 2026, 17:08 UTC
Ranking model: rs-public-oracle-state-v1
Forecast model: rs-model-entry-v1
Chart history contains only this ranking model's runs; legacy points are not spliced in.
Coupled 14-day outlook
rs-joint-entry-copula-v1
Any eligible RS entry
3%
Two or more lists
2%
Likely threshold order: Psychological → Mystery → Sci-fi → Main.
Leading bundle: Psychological + Mystery + Sci-fi (1%).
Estimated from one fitted shared story path; category probabilities are not multiplied as if lists were independent.
Separate entry forecast; this probability does not enter the ranking score.
Overall Rising Stars Shadow RS rank
#11737 of 12,365 · 11687 below RS #50
By genre
beats 72% of similar stories
not enough data yet
beats 23% of similar stories
Hidden gem — exposure is the bottleneck
Readers who find this story follow it at a high rate; there just aren't enough of them. In our cohort data, near-daily posting lifted the odds of reaching 25 followers from ~0% to 17% — more chapters, shoutout swaps and ads buy the eyeballs this conversion deserves.
Benchmarks: 8,060 active Royal Road stories, percentiles within the 50–149 chapters band, cohort of 2026-07-02. Conversion is measured as followers gained per 1,000 views over the recent window.
